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February 25, 1998

Defector Claims Soviets Had Chemical Warfare Plan

By TIM WEINER

WASHINGTON -- A defector from the former Soviet biological weapons program
said in an interview Tuesday that Moscow's cold war plans for World War III
included preparing "hundreds of tons" of anthrax bacteria and scores of tons
of smallpox and plague viruses.

The defector, Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov, now known as Ken Alibek, was
second-in-command of a branch of the Soviet program and defected in 1992.
He said Tuesday that these bacteria and viruses could have been mounted on
intercontinental ballistic missile warheads on several days' notice in the
early 1980s. Alibek, a 47-year-old native of Kazakhstan, said the Russian
military was still running a biological weapons program in 1991, a year after
Mikhail Gorbachev ordered it halted.

Alibek, who said he has decided to speak publicly for the first time to fight
the spread of biological weapons and to seek absolution for making them,
was introduced to The New York Times by producers of the ABC News program
"PrimeTime Live," which interviewed him last month and will broadcast the
interview on Wednesday night.

Alibek, who works as a private consultant, has written a highly classified
study of the Soviet biological weapons program for the U.S. government. He
now is offering a unique public description of a weapons program that was
for decades one of Moscow's deepest secrets.

Considered by U.S. intelligence officials to be credible about the subjects
he knows firsthand -- the size and structure of the Soviet biological weapons
program from 1975 to 1991 -- Alibek is thought to be less reliable on political
and military issues he knew secondhand.

He said he believes a vestige of Moscow's cold war biological-weapons program
is continuing under the guise of defensive research in Russia. The
offensive-weapons program was officially canceled by President Gorbachev
in 1990, officially canceled again by President Boris Yeltsin in 1992, and
remains officially defunct in today's Russia.

Nevertheless, Alibek said, "they continue to do research to develop new
biological agents; they conduct research and explain it as being for defensive
purposes."

This question of whether Russia persists in the research and development
of biological weapons is hotly debated in the U.S. intelligence community.
No one has a hard-and-fast answer. Many analysts think some elements of the
old Soviet program are continuing, but are far from certain that these include
the development of offensive weapons. No official response to Alibek's interview
was available Tuesday either from Moscow or from the Russian Embassy in
Washington.

"We can say Russia continues research in this area to maintain its military
biological potential," Alibek said. "They keep safe their personnel, their
scientific knowledge. And they still have production capability."

The U.S. biological-weapons program was canceled by President Richard M.
Nixon nearly 30 years ago. The United States continues to do research on
programs to defend itself against biological attack, as Russia says it does.

But Alibek said the Soviets never believed that the American biological-weapons
program had ended. Through the 1970s and the 1980s, they pursued their own
program in a secret arms race against a perceived threat.

Alibek, a medical doctor who held the rank of colonel in the Soviet military,
left the former Soviet Union in 1992, traveling by commercial airliner from
Almaty, then the capital of Kazakhstan, to New York City -- not as dramatic
a flight as taken by some cold war defectors, but still a risky proposition.
He chooses not to discuss its details, saying friends back home would suffer.

After Alibek arrived in the United States, he was debriefed for the Central
Intelligence Agency by Bill Patrick, who helped run the United States'
biological-weapons program from 1948 to 1969.

"Once he decided to defect, he made a dedicated effort to tell all of the
details -- the processes, the agents, the strategy, the concept of use --
to the United States to help us understand the largest and oldest biological
warfare program in the world," Patrick said.

"It scared the hell out of me when I first talked to this fellow," he said.

Patrick said he learned in his talks with Alibek that the Soviet program
"paralleled ours very closely" in terms of military technology, though "it
took them many, many years to get past us with respect to biological agents,
delivery systems and munitions."

By 1989, he and Alibek said in separate interviews, the Soviet program dwarfed
the United States effort. "If we produced a pound of anything they produced
a hundred to five hundred," Patrick said.

But in late 1989, Alibek said, there came "a time of severe pressure from
the United States and Great Britain to stop the Soviet Union offensive programs."
There also came the seeds of doubt that led to his defection.

"For a long period of time, I was proud of doing this work -- until the late
1980s, until I came to Moscow as first deputy chief of program," he said.
"Then came the pressure to stop the work."

"We strongly believed the United States had an offensive program," and that
the Soviet Union had to match it, he said. "I asked two high-ranking military
intelligence officers if information was available about these United States
offensive weapons. They asked me: 'What do you need?' I answered: 'The name,
location, organization, structure, amount of personnel, what agents they
possess.'

"I was told: 'We don't have this information,' " he said. "This was when
I had my first doubts."

Alibek's account of the 1979 incident in which a cloud of anthrax was released
into the atmosphere from a Soviet weapons plant at Sverdlovsk is dramatic.
But it was challenged Tuesday by American experts who have studied the disaster,
including Dr. Matthew Meselson of Harvard University and Milton Leitenberg
of the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of
Maryland.

Alibek said that "practically everybody who was in the footprint of that
cloud has died," and that the death toll was in the hundreds. Meselson and
Leitenberg said that there were tens of thousands of people in "the footprint,"
or the path, of the toxic cloud; there have been 62 confirmed deaths.

Alibek also said that Yeltsin, then the local Communist Party boss in Sverdlovsk,
was personally and morally responsible for covering up the incident.

"Yeltsin is responsible for everything that was done to contain that
information," he said. He added that he believed that Russian military leaders
have used that fact to blackmail Yeltsin into continuing a secret biological
weapons program.

This theory, if true, could explain the persistence of a Soviet-era program
to build better biological weapons. But the former Soviet intelligence service,
the KGB, not Yeltsin, is generally thought to have played the leading role
in hushing up the Sverdlovsk incident, according to several intelligence
analysts.

For Alibek the biological arms race that once consumed his life is now a
race to stop the spread of such weapons to terrorist groups and rogue states.
"We have an invisible competition between governments and these organizations,"
he said. "Who is faster? Who is better prepared?"

The answer, he said, may lie in the decisions of his former Soviet colleagues
to work for peace or for the highest bidder. "They are everywhere today,"
he said. "Most are in Russia. But some are overseas, abroad. And we have
lost control of them."